This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

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Tuesday, July 29, 2014

How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us

How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us

Henry Cabluck/AP Images
Texas State Board of Education members Cynthia Dunbar, Barbara
Cargill, and Gail Lowe discussing curriculum standards, Austin, May
2008. Cargill, who was appointed chairwoman last year by Governor Rick
Perry, has expressed concern that there are now only ‘six true
conservative Christians on the board.’

“What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas when it comes to textbooks”

No
matter where you live, if your children go to public schools, the
textbooks they use were very possibly written under Texas influence. If
they graduated with a reflexive suspicion of the concept of separation
of church and state and an unexpected interest in the contributions of
the National Rifle Association to American history, you know who to
blame.

When it comes to meddling with school textbooks, Texas is
both similar to other states and totally different. It’s hardly the only
one that likes to fiddle around with the material its kids study in
class. The difference is due to size—4.8 million textbook-reading
schoolchildren as of 2011—and the peculiarities of its system of
government, in which the State Board of Education is selected in
elections that are practically devoid of voters, and wealthy donors can
chip in unlimited amounts of money to help their favorites win.

Those
favorites are not shrinking violets. In 2009, the nation watched in awe
as the state board worked on approving a new science curriculum under
the leadership of a chair who believed that “evolution is hooey.” In
2010, the subject was social studies and the teachers tasked with
drawing up course guidelines were supposed to work in consultation with
“experts” added on by the board, one of whom believed that the income
tax was contrary to the word of God in the scriptures.

Ever since
the 1960s, the selection of schoolbooks in Texas has been a target for
the religious right, which worried that schoolchildren were being
indoctrinated in godless secularism, and political conservatives who
felt that their kids were being given way too much propaganda about the
positive aspects of the federal government. Mel Gabler, an oil company
clerk, and his wife, Norma, who began their textbook crusade at their
kitchen table, were the leaders of the first wave. They brought their
supporters to State Board of Education meetings, unrolling their “scroll
of shame,” which listed objections they had to the content of the
current reading material. At times, the scroll was fifty-four feet long.
Products of the Texas school system have the Gablers to thank for the
fact that at one point the New Deal was axed from the timeline of
significant events in American history.

The Texas State Board of Education, which approves textbooks,
curriculum standards, and supplemental materials for the public schools,
has fifteen members from fifteen districts whose boundaries don’t
conform to congressional districts, or really anything whatsoever. They
run in staggered elections that are frequently held in off years, when
always-low Texas turnout is particularly abysmal. The advantage tends to
go to candidates with passionate, if narrow, bands of supporters,
particularly if those bands have rich backers. All of which—plus a
natural supply of political eccentrics—helps explain how Texas once had a
board member who believed that public schools are the tool of the
devil.

Texas originally acquired its power over the nation’s
textbook supply because it paid 100 percent of the cost of all public
school textbooks, as long as the books in question came from a very
short list of board-approved options. The selection process “was
grueling and tension-filled,” said Julie McGee, who worked at high
levels in several publishing houses before her retirement. “If you
didn’t get listed by the state, you got nothing.” On the other side of
the coin, David Anderson, who once sold textbooks in the state, said
that if a book made the list, even a fairly mediocre salesperson could
count on doing pretty well. The books on the Texas list were likely to
be mass-produced by the publisher in anticipation of those sales, so
other states liked to buy them and take advantage of the economies of
scale.

“What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas when it comes
to textbooks,” said Dan Quinn, who worked as an editor of social studies
textbooks before joining the Texas Freedom Network, which was founded
by Governor Ann Richards’s daughter, Cecile, to counter the religious
right.

As a market, the state was so big and influential that
national publishers tended to gear their books toward whatever it
wanted. Back in 1994, the board requested four hundred revisions in five
health textbooks it was considering. The publisher Holt, Rinehart and
Winston was the target for the most changes, including the deletion of
toll-free numbers for gay and lesbian groups and teenage suicide
prevention groups. Holt announced that it would pull its book out of the
Texas market rather than comply. (A decade later Holt was back with a
new book that eliminated the gay people.)

Given the high cost of
developing a single book, the risk of messing with Texas was high. “One
of the most expensive is science,” McGee said. “You have to hire medical
illustrators to do all the art.” When she was in the business, the cost
of producing a new biology book could run to $5 million. “The
investments are really great and it’s all on risk.”

Imagine the
feelings of the textbook companies—not to mention the science
teachers—when, in response to a big push from the Gablers, the state
board adopted a rule in 1974 that textbooks mentioning the theory of
evolution “should identify it as only one of several explanations of the
origins of humankind” and that those treating the subject extensively
“shall be edited, if necessary, to clarify that the treatment is
theoretical rather than factually verifiable.” The state attorney
general eventually issued an opinion that the board’s directive wouldn’t
stand up in court, and the rule was repealed. But the beat went on.

“Evolution is hooey”

Texas
is hardly the only state with small, fierce pressure groups trying to
dictate the content of textbooks. California, which has the most public
school students, tends to come at things from the opposite side,
pressing for more reflection of a crunchy granola worldview. “The word
in publishing was that for California you wanted no references to fast
food, and in Texas you wanted no references to sex,” Quinn told me. But
California’s system of textbook approval focuses only on books for the
lower grades. Professor Keith Erekson, director of the Center for
History Teaching and Learning at the University of Texas at El Paso,
says that California often demands that its texts have a
Californiacentric central narrative that would not be suitable for
anywhere else, while “the Texas narrative can be used in other states.”
Publishers tend to keep information on who buys how much of what secret,
but Erekson said he’s seen estimates that the proportion of social
studies textbooks sold containing the basic Texas-approved narrative
range from about half to 80 percent.

Some extremely rich Texans
have gotten into the board of education election game, putting their
money at the disposal of conservative populists. No one has had more
impact than James Leininger, the San Antonio physician who has had an
intense interest in promoting school vouchers. He backed a group called
Texans for Governmental Integrity, which was particularly active in
state school board elections. Its most famous campaign was in 1994, when
it mailed flyers to voters’ homes in one district, showing a black man
kissing a white man and claiming that the Democratic incumbent had voted
for textbooks that promoted homosexuality. Another organization
Leininger has supported, the Heidi Group, sent out a prayer calendar in
1998, which unnervingly urged the right-to-life faithful to devote one
day to praying that a San Antonio doctor who performed abortions “will
come to see Jesus face to face.”

The chorus of objections to
textbook material mounted. Approval of environmental science books was
once held up over board concern that they were teaching children to be
more loyal to their planet than their country. As the board became a
national story and a national embarrassment, the state legislature
attempted to put a lid on the chaos in 1995 by restricting the board’s
oversight to “factual errors.” This made surprisingly little impact when
you had a group of deciders who believed that the theory of evolution,
global warming, and separation of church and state are all basically
errors of fact.
In 2009, when the science curriculum was once
again up for review, conservatives wanted to require that it cover the
“strengths and weaknesses” of the theory of evolution. In the end, they
settled for a face-saving requirement that students consider gaps in
fossil records and whether natural selection is enough to explain the
complexity of human cells. Don McLeroy, the board chairman who had
opined that “evolution is hooey,” told Washington Monthly that he felt the changes put Texas “light years ahead of any other state when it comes to challenging evolution!”

The
process by which the board came to its interesting decisions sometimes
seemed confused to the point of incoherence. Things would begin tidily,
with panels of teachers and expert consultants. Then the expert
consultants multiplied, frequently becoming less and less expert, until
the whole process ended in a rash of craziness. The science curriculum
was “this document that had been worked on for months,” Nathan Bernier, a
reporter for KUT in Austin, told National Public Radio.

Members
of the [teachers’ association] had been involved…. People with Ph.D.s
had been involved in developing these standards. And then at the last
second, there was this mysterious document that was shoved underneath
the hotel doors of some of the board members, and this document, at the
very last minute, wound up—large portions of it wound up making its way
into the guidelines.

In 2010, the board
launched itself into the equally contentious sea of the social studies
curriculum, and the teacher-dominated team tasked with writing the
standards was advised by a panel of “experts,” one of whom was a member
of the Minutemen militia. Another had argued that only white people were
responsible for advancing civil rights for minorities in America, since
“only majorities can expand political rights in America’s
constitutional society.”

“The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel,” McLeroy told Washington Monthly.
“Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for
saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last
twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

In their first year of
work on social studies, the board agreed that students should be
required to study the abandonment of the gold standard as a factor in
the decline in the value of the dollar. If the students were going to
study the McCarthy anti-Communist witch hunt of the 1950s, they were
also going to contemplate “how the later release of the Venona papers
confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in US government.”

The
changes often seemed to be thrown out haphazardly, and to pass or fail
on the basis of frequently opaque conclusions on the part of the swing
members. In 2010, the board tossed out books by the late Bill Martin
Jr., the author of Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?, from a list of authors third-graders might want to study because someone mixed him up with Bill Martin, the author of Ethical Marxism.

The final product the board came up with called for a
curriculum that would make sure that students studying economic issues
of the late nineteenth century would not forget “the cattle industry
boom” and that when they turned to social issues like labor, growth of
the cities, and problems of immigrants they also take time to dwell on
“the philanthropy of industrialists.” When it came to the Middle Ages,
the board appeared to be down on any mention of the Crusades, an
enterprise that tends to reflect badly on the Christian side of
Christian–Islamic conflict. And when they got to the cold war era, the
board wanted to be sure students would be able to “explain how Arab
rejection of the State of Israel has led to ongoing conflict.” Later,
they were supposed to study “Islamic fundamentalism and the subsequent
use of terrorism by some of its adherents.” And that appeared to be
pretty much all young people in Texas were going to be required to know
about Arab nations and the world’s second-largest religion.

For
the most part, however, the board seemed determined just to sprinkle
stuff its members liked hither and yon, and eliminate words they found
objectionable in favor of more appealing ones. Reading through the
deletions and additions, it becomes clear that a majority of board
members hated the word “democratic,” for which they consistently
substituted “constitutional republic.” They also really disliked
“capitalism” (see rather: “free enterprise system”) and “natural law”
(“laws of nature and nature’s God”).

Study of the first part of
the twentieth century should include not only the Spanish-American War
and Theodore Roosevelt but also Sanford B. Dole, a Hawaiian lawyer and
son of missionaries. When teachers get to Clarence Darrow, Henry Ford,
and Charles Lindbergh, they’d also better not forget Glenn Curtiss, who
broke early motorcycle speed records. For the modern era, they needed to
study “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s,” including
Equal Rights Amendment opponent Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With
America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National
Rifle Association. And when students learn how to describe the impact of
cultural movements like “Tin Pan Alley, the Harlem Renaissance, the
Beat Generation, rock and roll,” the board demanded that they also look
into “country and western music.”
That last one actually seems totally fair.

The social studies
curriculum was perhaps the last hurrah for the extreme agenda that Don
McLeroy, the anti-evolution dentist, had championed. When the
discussions began, he could frequently rally a majority on the
fifteen-member panel, with the consistent support of people like Cynthia
Dunbar, who once wrote that sending children to public schools was like
“throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel
threw their children to Moloch.” (She also once called Barack Obama a
terrorist sympathizer.) In 2011, Dunbar announced her retirement; she
had been commuting between Texas and Virginia, where she taught at Jerry
Falwell’s Liberty University School of Law. After McLeroy himself lost a
Republican primary to a candidate who believes in evolution, Barbara
Cargill, his successor as board chair, expressed concern that she was
left with only “six true conservative Christians on the board.”

“Readable? I’ve never heard a discussion of that”

These days the Texas board is far less powerful than in its heyday. But in a way, it’s more influential than ever.

The
state legislature has diluted the board’s ability to control what books
local districts pick. And the expanding Web-based curricula make it
easier for publishers to work around the preferences of any one state,
no matter how big. But students all around the country will be feeling
the effect of Texas on their textbooks for years, if not generations.
That’s because the school board’s most important contribution has not
been to make textbooks inaccurate. It’s been to help make them
unreadable.
“Readable? I’ve never heard a discussion of that,” said Julie McGee.

The
typical school textbook is composed of a general narrative sprinkled
liberally with “boxes”—sidebars presenting the biographies of prominent
individuals, and highlighting particular trends, social issues, or
historical events. As the textbook wars mounted, those boxes multiplied
like gerbils. It’s the ideal place to stash the guy who broke the
motorcycle speed record, or the cattle boom, or, perhaps, the gold
standard. (It’s also where, in bows to gender and racial equality,
mini-biographies of prominent women and minorities can be floated.) In
an era of computerized publishing, changing the boxes is easy. The
problem comes when the publisher has to change the narrative, something
many committees of experts may have labored over at the cost of millions
of dollars.

All the bickering and pressuring over the years has
caused publishers to shy away from using the kind of clear, lively
language that might raise hackles in one corner or another. The more
writers were constrained by confusing demands and conflicting requests,
the more they produced unreadable mush. Texas, you may not be surprised
to hear, has been particularly good at making things mushy. In 2011, the
Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank,
issued an evaluation of US history standards for public schools. The
institute was a longtime critic of curricula that insisted that
representatives of women and minorities be included in all parts of
American history. But the authors, Sheldon Stern and Jeremy Stern, really
hated what the Texas board had done. Besides incorporating “all the
familiar politically correct group categories,” the authors said,

the
document distorts or suppresses less triumphal or more nuanced aspects
of our past that the Board found politically unacceptable (slavery and
segregation are all but ignored, while religious influences are grossly
exaggerated). The resulting fusion is a confusing, unteachable
hodgepodge.

All around the country, teachers and students
are left to make their way through murky generalities as they struggle
through the swamps of boxes and lists. “Maybe the most striking thing
about current history textbooks is that they have lost a controlling
narrative,” wrote historian Russell Shorto.
And that’s the legacy.
Texas certainly didn’t single-handedly mess up American textbooks, but
its size, its purchasing heft, and the pickiness of the school board’s
endless demands—not to mention the board’s overall craziness—certainly
made it the trend leader. Texas has never managed to get evolution out
of American science textbooks. It’s been far more successful in helping
to make evolution—and history, and everything else—seem boring.